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Football: Sallisaw Sprints Past Muldrow, 42-20

Sallisaw 42

Muldrow 20

SUMMARY – Cale Wilson and Jaden Davenport each ran for two touchdowns to lead Sallisaw to its fifth straight 4A-4 win and put the Black Diamonds in contention for the top district playoff seed with one week left in the regular season.

TURNING POINT – Down 21-6 early in the third quarter, Muldrow got inside the Sallisaw 20 but couldn’t capitalize.

Sallisaw’s workhorse senior tailback rushed for touchdowns on runs of 62 and 52 yards — hurdling Muldrow defenders on both plays and throughout the night – in the Black Diamonds’ 42-20 win against Muldrow. Sallisaw (7-2, 5-1 4A-4) won its fifth straight district game and hosts Fort Gibson next week in a huge regular-season finale between two teams at the top of the standings.

Leading 14-6 at the half, Sallisaw got going right out of the gate in the third quarter when Wilson tore through the middle for a 62-yard TD run on half’s first play. On the ensuing kickoff, Dedrick White’s 60-yard return set up Muldrow (2-7, 2-4) in Sallisaw territory, but the Bulldogs came up empty on an 11-play drive.

“(Wilson) is a good player,” Muldrow coach Rob Johnson said. “The third quarter killed us. The effort’s always there, we just have to clean stuff up.”

The third quarter is when Sallisaw took control with three unanswered scores, stretching its lead to 42-6 with less than five minutes to play.

“We didn’t get any momentum going until the second half, when we broke that touchdown run,” said Sallisaw coach Craig Benson. “We’re not flashy and we don’t have that many plays, but we have a lot of formations and we have some talented athletes up front, two really good running backs, and a quarterback who leads and directs it.

“I don’t think there’s any magic to what we do. We’re a different football team than we’ve been the last few years because we’re more vanilla and we’ve kind of gone back to our heritage. This is what the Black Diamonds are known for, so we’ve progressively gotten a little better each week.”

Muldrow quarterback Dominic Blue, under constant pressure from the Black Diamonds’ defense, produced a late 4-yard TD run. After the Bulldogs recovered a Sallisaw fumble on the ensuing kickoff, Blue’s 59-yard run set up a 5-yard plunge by Cade Matthews.

“Blue is really a fine athlete,” Benson said. “There are times we had him wrapped up and he just slips away. He’s very strong and a good competitor. That’s was the game plan going in, that we had to stop him. We’ve seen him for the past four years. We were able to contain him and he didn’t get loose until late when everything was said and done.”